Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of College English Reading MOOC From The Perspective Of Logico-semantic Relations

This study is the analysis and interpretation of multimodal discourse of an English Reading MOOC on the basis of the theories of Halliday's logico-semantic relations.Data of this study are drawn from College English Reading MOOC offered by UOOC.Applying the theories of Halliday's logico-semantic relations,this thesis adopts a qualitative approach to explore how teachers use visual texts including graphological texts,static pictures and videos to elaborate,extend and enhance the teacher's talk in College English Reading MOOC to achieve pedagogical objects.The major findings are as follows.Firstly,the relations between graphological texts and teacher's talk are mainly of two kinds: enhancement and enhancement based elaboration.The enhancement relation between the graphological text and teacher's talk is realized by the different color and size to enhance the place of the sentences,difficult words and phrases.As for the enhancement based elaboration relations between graphological text and teacher's talk,the teacher usually uses the enhancement in the first place,and then the elaboration is deployed,when the teacher explains the difficult words and sentences in the text explanation part.Secondly,the relations between static pictures and teacher's talk include elaboration,extension and enhancement.There are two sub-types of elaboration-exposition and exemplification between static pictures and teacher's talk.The exposition between static pictures and teacher's talk is to explain the abstract nouns,the famous person and nouns of objects.Exemplification is realized by hyponymy and meronymy.The extension relation between static pictures and teacher's talk provides the additive information of the pictures to teacher's talk.Enhancement between static pictures and teacher's talk is realized by place and reason.Thirdly,the relations between videos and teacher's talk are classified as elaboration,elaboration based extension and elaboration based enhancement.In the lead-in part,the teacher mainly uses elaboration relation between videos and teacher's talk to depict events in order to provide background information.In the text explanation part,videos are used to explain the nouns and noun phrases with action meaning and verbs.The relations between videos and teacher's talk in the text explanation cover three kinds: elaboration,elaboration based extension and elaboration based enhancement.With regard to elaboration based extension between videos and teacher's talk,the videos extend the teacher's talk by adding new information about foreign culture with the help of the cultural comparison on the basis of the elaboration.The elaboration based enhancement begins with the deployment of elaboration followed by the use of enhancement on the basis of the teacher's talk.This thesis has the theoretical and pedagogical implications.Theoretically,this study demonstrates the applicability and practicability of the logic-semantic relation in analyzing dynamic discourse of MOOC discourse as well as enriches the study on multimodal discourse analysis of the classroom teaching.Pedagogically,by means of this study,teachers can fully understand the relations between different modes so that they can make the best of the different modes to expand their talks in the class.